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April 13, New York – In response to the Trump administration dropping the 21,600-pound GBU-43/B bomb in Afghanistan, the Center for Constitutional Rights issued the following statement:

Not even 100 days into its term, the Trump administration has rapidly expanded and intensified the already-extensive U.S. military interventions around the world, by engaging in a widespread and destructive multi-country bombing campaign with questionable, and in some cases nil, legal authorization. Among dangerous other military escalations, his administration conducted a raid in Yemen that left nine children and one U.S. Navy SEAL dead, airstrikes in Syria and Iraq that have resulted in more than a thousand civilian deaths, and today, for the first time in history, dropped the largest non-nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal on targets in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province on the border of Pakistan. This is all happening as the Trump administration has loosened regulations designed to limit civilian casualties, while engaging in dangerous saber-rattling around the nuclear arsenal. While the purported legal authorization for some of these military engagements is outdated and questionable, others, such as strikes in Syria, are clearly without legal authority under U.S. law, and, despite the adrenaline-like appeal to hypocrites and hawks in the Beltway, they also likely violate international law. The Trump administration – undeterred by law and unconcerned with human suffering – is setting the world on a destructive course of escalating war, death and destruction. We call on the people to demand an end to this dangerous further slide into endless, unconstrained militarism that he and his generals are playing out like an incoherent game across the globe, and further call on the media and the courts to expose the illegality of his actions.

The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.